Posts Tagged ‘Israel’

Our Civilization Is Not Just “Judeo-Christian”, Far From It, Yet All Too Many Think It Is:

Judaism contained the initial versions of Abrahamism. 2,000 years ago it gave birth to Christianism (in its many versions) and later Christianism was adopted as “Orthodox Catholicism” by Roman emperors as a metaphysical version of, and indomitable support for, their secular fascism.

Many scholars have argued that Christianism was the straw which broke the back of the Roman state. (Although it seems likely to me that Christianism gave an excuse to a much deeper rot, which, in turn, caused the altruism of Christianism.)

This cult of “Judeo-Christianism”, however mistaken, precisely because it’s so mistaken, has to be addressed.

Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, Largest (Herod’s) Version. Destroyed in 70 CE. King Solomon Built Part of It, A Millennium Earlier. Solomon was married to the daughter of Pharaoh. Only a 488 meters long retaining wall is left today, while Christians and Muslims built churches and mosques on top of the emplacement, in an apparent demonstration of whom owned what, the old fashion (jungle) way!

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Paleologue O asks me in Aeon: “I would be interested to hear more about how the intolerance of the Jews led to the Judean Wars and their subsequent dispersal. What’s your thesis?”

Simon was captured alive, although he fought to the bitter end. He was brought to Rome and executed by very public whipping (the leader of the Zealots, John of Gischala was condemned to life imprisonment). The first approach to the period is to read the (huge) entire work of the historian Josephus, adoptive son of emperor Vespasian. Josephus had been elected general by the Jewish People, but, after much valorous fighting, was besieged and had to surrender to (then) general Vespasian and his son, general Titus.

In general, the attitude of the Jews made little sense, except if one believed, as many Jews did, that they had a deal with god. Under Rome, the Jews could practice their religion, and even apply some of their most abusive theocratic laws: witness Saint Paul, a Jew named Saul who committed the (fatal) sin of having visited the Jewish temple in Jerusalem with a bodyguard who was not a Jew.

Saul had persecuted the Christians (supposedly) before becoming one himself. Saul’s work on behalf of the Gentiles infuriated Jewish theocrats.

So Saul was condemned to death, and arrested by the authorities. He was imprisoned 2 years by the Roman governor of Judea. As Saul was also an important Roman citizen (a prosecutor), he successfully asked to be judged in Rome, and not by the order of the High Jewish Priests, the Sanhedrin. Paul disappeared in Rome around 67 CE or 68 CE (executed by order of the evil Jews, said some Christians, or the evil Nero, said others, if he was not exfiltrated to Spain say still others…)

Meanwhile, by 66 CE, fanatical Jewish factions, the “Zealots” and “Sicari” took control of Jerusalem (full of hatred for each others, not just the Greco-Romans). When other Jews tried to flee the city they were crucified (with as many as 500 crucifixions in one day!)

In general, Abrahamism stinks, as the founding legend, Abraham, was ready to execute his son, just because his boss asked him to. (Imagine Google, aka God ask you to kill someone dearest to you?) Whereas I say that when a God asks for the death of one’s child, or any child, He should be told: F U! That’s a question of basic morality. If a god doesn’t deserve respect, it should get it.

One can compare how Celts, Punics and Jews reacted to the rise of civilization (in its Greco-Roman version). The former two laid low superstitiously speaking: they stopped pretending that they had better metaphysics than the Roman Republic (the Saxons would do the same after being beaten into submission by Charlemagne for 30 years).

After the Romans defeated (some of) them, Celts and Punics condemned their own religions, they said OK to Rome, and they helped build a constructive empire (defeated “Gaul” was the most important and powerful province of Rome after the First Century, and the relationship of Italy and Gaul got inverted, pacifically; soon enough, Carthage was again one of the Greco-Roman empire’s greatest cities).

Whereas some Jewish factions in Jerusalem opted to resist fanatically and murderously the Greco-Roman empire. Not all Jews did so, thus Judaism survived the eradication of the fanatics (differently from the Samaritans who fought as one, later, so only 3,000 are left, now…) Those vicious factions were based in Jerusalem, but not present among the dozens of thousands of Jews in Alexandria. After the second Jewish war, in 132-135 CE, the Jews were dispersed out of Israel, rebaptized “Palestina” on the occasion, so here we are…

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Paleologue replied: “Thanks for the Cliff Notes version. I hadn’t realized they’d started off by killing 600 Roman soldiers. A fatal tactical blunder. Obviously the Zealots didn’t have a proper diplomatic corps, to put their case in more reasonable terms. Had they followed the advice of some in-house Gandhi figure, to suggest the non-violent way, they might have met with greater success. (They certainly couldn’t have done any worse.)

I do have a nice copy of Josephus sitting around. But it’s so heavy I have so far put off reading it. I do have kind of a long reading list already. Maybe I should bump it up a hundred places.”

Not just that, but an entire Roman legion, Legio XII Fulminata, was sent to re-establish order, and then, after evacuating Jerusalem, fell into an ambush. This time more than 6,000 Roman soldiers died, shocking the entire empire.

Reading Josephus is a must. One of the greatest classics ever, which even the crazed-out Christian monks found valuable enough to save. The Zealots, Sicari and others were into hatred and killing (as they showed by killing each other). Being out there to kill humans en masse is one of the most instinctive, if not the most sacred, mass behavior of humans. Because, without it, humanity would not exist anymore than it would, without love. Yeah, right, it’s crazy. But even more crazy to ignore it.

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One thing is clear to me; those who claim to love Judaism should decrease their fanaticism, and tribal exaltation:

(Besides, it’s hypocritical as the inertness of American Jews demonstrated, when confronting Nazism: it’s the French Republic, which is not Jewish, but laic, which stood in the way of Nazism, not the Jews; as Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil pointed out, making lots of PC enemies in the process… Life among intellectuals would be devoid of spice without PC, Perfect Cretins…)

In particular, genital mutilation, a hallmark of Jews shouldn’t not have to be tolerated when visited on males more than it should be when visited on females. (Yes, there are good arguments for both; but good arguments can be found for anything, whatsoever, if one changes one’s parameters to crazy enough…)

Jewish fanaticism backfired many times in history. (Christian fanaticism was, mostly, done away with, and mostly an imperial tool, anyway; but Christians never claimed to have been given a piece of land by their own private god… Only the all too secular Charlemagne gave land to the Pope…)

Now the Jews claim they own the land of Israel. They have a good historical case, but moderation is key. Punics, Celts, the Franks, and all sorts of Germans and the Saxons saw the light, when confronted to higher civilization, and, after fighting it, learned the mistakes of their ways, and embraced it. (By 950 CE, the Saxons had become the pillar of the Franco-Roman empire, while Western Francia disintegrated in 63 political authorities…)

The problem with, and the force of, Judaism is tribalism. Tribalism without a higher cause is just racism. Some will say the god of the tribe is enough of a higher cause. Not so. The tribal god himself needs a higher, universal cause: this is why Catholicism became universal (Catholic means universal). This is also why Islamism became universal (it has universal pretense, although it’s to call for the killing all sorts of people)

Now, pleasing the empire is more important than ever. Because the empire, and its enemies, have never been more powerful. A mistake or two, and billions of people could end up dead.

Thus those who cultivate tribalism and exclusion, as if they were delicate flowers of the greatest value, tickle the dragon. The thermonuclear dragon. Let us remind them their gods are of the highest immorality.

I rarely mention Israel. Not just because the country has suffered enough already. Not just because the situation is not interesting. But mostly because Israel is such a special case that it is hard to extract generalities from it. Also its fate is mostly controlled by external factors. However, something important happened there recently: not just the commemoration of the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis, but how deputy chief of staff Yair Golan, the second in command of the Israeli army chose to kick it off by comparing today’s Israel with Nazi Germany.

I salute the following comment, which has long been pretty much at the core of my own philosophy, for decades. IDF Major General Yair Golan, reading from a prepared text:

“The Holocaust in my eyes must bring us to deep contemplation of the nature of man, even when that man is myself. The Holocaust must bring us to deep contemplation on the matter of the responsibility of leadership, on the matter of the quality of a society… Shoah [Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis] must impel us here and now to reflect fundamentally on how here and now we take care of the stranger, the widow and the orphan.”

Morality, like logic, can be anything. This being said, the IDF has not been too immoral yet…

Yair Gollan went all out in warning Israel: “If there’s anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is identifying some horrifying processes that took place in Europe in general and in particularly Germany up to 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and finding evidence of their repetition here in our society today in 2016. It is easier and simpler to hate a person. It is easy and simple to arouse fear, to scare-monger. It is easy to become dehumanized, callous, sanctimonious.”

90 years ago brings us back to 1926. But actually, Nietzsche was denouncing strident tribal anti-Judaism in Germany in the 1880s. Inspection of the historical record shows that state legislated anti-Judaism originated in Prussia in the eighteenth century. As a British ally against France, anti-Judaism thus became something that Great Britain condoned, and even outright supported. After the French were defeated in 1815 CE, Anti-Judaism became the law in German-speaking land (Jews could not be doctors and lawyers, etc.)

Yair Golan is a proven hawk in matter of defense, although he started the practice of treating Syrians wounded in the Syrian civil war in Israeli hospitals. Like all the leadership of the Israeli army and the Mossad (Israel CIA, complete with assassinations in what became also the French way, and also, more recently, learning from example, the US way… That the Jews and French decided that to become way nastier, in some circumstances, was more moral, after their experiences with Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini should surprise no one…), Golan sees the present situation as an opportunity to make a real peace with the Palestinians. (An assessment that neither the Likud, Hamas or Hezbollah share, as it would undermine their reasons for being…)

How did the whole anti-Jewish madness start? It was a long story, started in Pagan Rome. It should be its own essay. The evolution of a lucrative madness always presents many twists and turns…

The worst part of anti-Judaism is not that it happened, but that, sometimes, and for centuries, it did not exist, at all. This means that something terrible, only founded on the admittedly very satisfying urge to hate somebody, or an entire category of people, can be reborn after centuries of eradication. In other words, the rebirth of fanatical anti-Judaism from its ashes show that cannibalism and slavery as an industry could well reappear in the future. Let alone strict laws enforcing state sexism, etc.

Speaking of evil reborn, Wall Street has raised already $23 million for Clinton in this election cycle. At least $4.3 million from Wall Street has gone directly into Clinton’s presidential campaign, and another $18.7 million has gone to the super PAC backing her, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Wall Street is a vast army, and its morality is greed. It’s not about orphans.

One third of financial executives’ donations went to Clinton in 2015 and the first quarter of 2016. Now Wall Street donors to (ex) Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush have thrown their weight behind Clinton. Trump received less than 1% of Wall Street donation, and the best financed “candidate” until now has been that of rich Republican donors, AGAINST Trump. (This means that the hysteria against Trump is financed by bedfellows who want to devour each other.)

So how did one get to “The Holocaust”? First “The” Holocaust was part of a much more general, and older pattern: Auschwitz was initially created for Poles, for exterminating Poles, not Jews (although no doubt they were thinking about Jews). And that, in turn was part of a program of extermination of Poland which was at least two centuries old, and itself motivated by greed and world domination: hence the deliberate attack on the world on August 1, 1914.

All this could develop because, all too few saw it for what it was: although Nietzsche condemned the system of thought which would come to be called “Nazism” a generation later, his voice was lonely. Let me notice in passing that the Will To Extermination is the ultimate expression of the Will To Power.

Thus Yair Golan is right: One “must bring us to deep contemplation of the nature of man, even when that man is myself. The Holocaust must bring us to deep contemplation on the matter of the responsibility of leadership, on the matter of the quality of a society.”

After World War Two, the Germans, that is, the German intellectual leadership denied responsibility, as usual. That was an egregious lie. Yet, anxious to fend off Stalin, the Western democracies acquiesced to this fiction. In truth, most of what came to be known as Nazism was the significant essence of (a very significant part of) German society, before Adolf Hitler was even in diapers.

Today’s Israel is in not in such situation, by a very long shot. However, one could imagine that it could well get there if the Jewish “Orthodox” fanatics keep growing in power: they are the ones who had brought the mood conducive to first, and completely pointless Judean War of 66 CE (Greeks had sacrificed birds in front of a synagogue). (The Orthodox Jews escape the military draft, thus don’t intersect with the IDF!)

By, the “leadership” one should not just understand elected politicians. “Leadership” does not mean just elected puppets such as Obama, or the Supreme Court and their meager contributions to the debate. It means mostly the Main Stream Media and the intellectual leadership: those who are viewed as wise, from Paul Krugman to the likes of Bill Gates, or popular authors.

To change minds, we have to change moods and the first mood to change is attention to significant details.

The easier way to destruction of an evil go through its explanation, and that starts with its contemplation. Lack of contemplation gives diabolization an election.

Wisdom is in the details. It may make it sometimes a bit too diabolical, but the ways of goodness are mysterious.

What do Israel and the Chinaman have in common? Fundamental biases dislocating a correct vision of reality which all lemmings ardently share, thus finding themselves very smart.

Once there was an English student in Scotland, enraptured, with his friend Lyell, listening to the discoveries of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck a research professor in Paris’ Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, pertaining to the immense age of the Earth, demonstrated by the evolution of microscopic features in fossilized mollusks (the family of mollusks was defined by Lamarck’s senior competitor, research professor Georges Léopole Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier).

Lyell’s, and other geologists’ field studies, mostly in France and Germany, showed indeed that stratigraphy and fossils confirmed Lamarck’s view. Darwin grew up, and later honorably tried to parrot in the Galapagos the work of Lamarck, with turtles and birds. However, the Galapagos are recent (maybe as little as nine million years), so speciation is weak: the birds are so little different, that there is a debate whether some of them are different species. Darwin did not have the good luck of Lamarck, studying really different, and extremely numerous mollusks.

In any case, the British Empire, in its wisdom, realized that Jesus Christ was becoming less of a bedrock of the splendor of said empire, so it switched to Darwin, proclaiming him the creator of evolution, and thus multiplying further the aura of the British ways. It worked: the head of state of Canada is still the Queen of England.

Trudeau: My Son Will Learn From Me How To Manipulate The Stupid Out There

In related news, China gave the “Confucius Prize” to the dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. Mugabe has reigned over the country for 35 years. This makes sense: Confucius was all for oligarchy, not to say plutocracy, as these regimes brought (apparent) peace. Confucianism as the default mode of China has been its main problem for twenty-six hundred years: the same family is in charge of Confucius for 26 centuries. Mao understood this, and that is why he used as an excuse to launch his “Cultural Revolution”.

But back to that other pillar of empire, Darwin. Darwin had decided that man came out of Africa, so that truth having been established, as Charles had replaced Jesus, it has been repeated ever since. The fact that there was no proof, it was even better, as it was an occasion to cultivate the celebrity/superstitious muscle. Celebrity and superstition go well together, as both assume that concept or creatures who cannot be observed, are up there, and to be “believed” in. Cultivating one or the other pertains to the same mood, so they reinforce each other.

It’s harder to find fossils in China. The climate tends to be much wetter than in Africa, and cycles of great heat and deep freezing, in the north, are not friendly to delicate corpses, either. However:

These 47 human teeth, dated to 80,000-120,000 years ago, were found in a limestone cave system in Daoxian, China. Those teeth from a cave in south China show that Homo sapiens reached China around 100,000 years ago—a time at which most researchers had assumed that our species had not trekked far beyond Africa.

“This is stunning, it’s major league,” says Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK who was not involved in the research. “It’s one of the most important finds coming out of Asia in the last decade.”

The teeth are unquestionably those of H. sapiens, says María Martinón-Torres, a palaeoanthropologist at University College London who co-led the study with colleagues Wu Liu and Xie-jie Wu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. Their small size, thin roots and flat crowns are typical for anatomically modern humans—H. sapiens—and the overall shape of the teeth is barely distinguishable from those of both ancient and present-day humans..

The team used calcite deposits, stratigraphy, and Uranium and Thorium datation methods.

Why were they Homo Sapiens Sapiens in China for 50,000 years, at least, before they appeared in Europe? Simple: stronger, smarter Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis were in the way.

That Homo would thrive in Asia is not surprising: it represents a huge amount of inhabitable warmish land. More such land than in Africa arguably. Neanderthals also occupied North Africa, so the Sapiens Sapiens would have had to sneak through. Maybe they did not sneak through, because Sapiens Sapiens is just the tropical variant of Homo, so was represented on both sides of the tropics equally. As I argued, once Neanderthals wore pants, .they may as well go tropical too, and revert to the more delicate, smaller, thus more prolific version of Sapiens.

In any case, this shows that turning scientists into gods is an insult to science: Einstein had no reason to believe in local reality, except that he had been conditioned (= fabricated) that way. The Einstein-robot just repeated mechanically what he knew by rote about reality. Fine. What’s not fine, was to make that into a religion. Same for some of Darwin’s pronouncements.

Some will say that’s just science, and surely politics don’t make the same mistake. Yet a beautiful example is the case of Israel. Netanyahu dared to go outside of official script, by pointing out that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a sort of Muslim Pope, took part in the extermination of the Jews. This is factually true.

Yet as all the deepest truths of World War Two, it’s no good to proffer it, if all you want is peace, in your little world, or, more exactly, torpor.

So what of Israel? Exasperated by Jewish rebellions which turned into full blown wars which killed many legionnaires, Rome outlawed Israel, threw the Jews out, and called the place Palestina.

225 years later, the philosopher-emperor, Julian, having studied in Athens and been elected in Paris, decided that the punishment had lasted long enough, and ordered the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and the return of the Jews. However Julian got killed, and replaced by Christian fanatics even worse than the ones before.

So here we are.

The “Two-States” solution will never work (long story). The facts, on the ground, is that Israel is not just occupying, colonizing, but invading the “West Bank” (60% of it).Denying this, and that the forces at work are so colossal, they can’t be stopped, is being a partisan of the present situation, the slow eating of Palestine by the Israeli boa.

What’s the only solution which can work? The One-State solution: one state, secular, rights of all critters, respected. That is the Israeli government has to respect the human rights of minorities.

Meanwhile Ivory Coast voted for president, for the economist turned president who had been barred, after being PM, from the Ivorian citizenship (for having not all his ancestors Ivorian). Ouattara got to power, thanks to some judiciously placed French rockets which landed his all too dictatorial predecessor in jail.

Some grumbled it all reminds them of “France-Afrique”, the connection between business interests, and the military help France provides with. Yes, sure, but as with Darwin or Israel, one has to look at reality: “France-Afrique” is bad, but the alternatives, USA Africa or Africa, Idi Amin Dada, or Mugabe style, are worse roads to plutocracy.

France cannot keep on making war on the behalf of all Europe, plus civilization, without finding a way to pay for it. And the same holds even for the much richer USA.

Canada elected heir, and hair apparent, Trudeau son of Trudeau (see above) has promised many things, including the Keystone Pipeline, something that not even Obama supports (Keystone is an attempt to make Canada even more filthy rich from filthy oil tar, while melting the permafrost up north). Weirdly, everybody is applauding, although, not satisfied with smothering the biosphere, Justin Trudeau has made many pro-Islamist utterances (the way he sees it, it just brings him votes).

Training to recognize reality can be done best in science, but what is learned has to be brought to politics. If you want progress, for real, stick to truth, for real.

Merkel and Hollande went together to see the president of Ukraine and the Russian dictator, in a last ditch effort before Putin sends his tanks across southern Ukraine (after a barrage of Russian rockets killed scores of civilians in the large Ukrainian town of Mariopol).

The meeting with Putin was icy. Defeated by the Russians, the Ukrainians have to negotiate. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees are evacuating. Putting requested a meeting with Merkel and Hollande alone. He wants the large city of Mariopol (so that, in a few months, he can dash towards Crimea, and then Odessa). Putin also wants twice the territory his agents control in Ukraine. We have seen this sort of methods in Munich, 1938.

OK, let’s be the devil’s advocate. Let’s talk in the name of peace. What does peace fear? War. The president of France just said there was war in Ukraine (the definition of a war is 1,000 killed; more than 6,000 were killed in the war in Ukraine, so far).

What Putin Wants: Russia, the Big Country. World War Would Be Even Better

“Pacifists” pontificate that no French, German or American, should die for Ukraine: Putin wants Ukraine, let him have it. Who cares about Ukraine? Sounds good, elevated. Peace will follow. If it sounds good, peace ought to follow: that’s pacifying logic. Logic done with a pacifier.

Then “pacifists” preen, deeply self-satisfied with their own goodness, friendliness, generosity, and general standing as higher human beings. They look themselves in the mirror, they love what they see. They call themselves progressive, and view others as imperialists, hopeless colonialists, violent serial offenders. If only the rest of humanity could be so detached, as they, the pacifists, themselves are.

But then the job of the philosophers is to be critical. It is never to opt for the easy way out. Philosophers never follow the herd, stampeding towards happiness. Philosophers ask: why does Putin want Ukraine so much? Putin says Ukraine was always Russian, that Russia owned all of Ukraine, or, at least, half of Ukraine, etc.

These are enormous lies: Ukraine was highly civilized, a millennium ago, and owned Crimea then, when Moscow was not even on any map. Moscow literally did not exist then. Descendants of Ukrainians and Vikings had not gone that far to the east.

In truth, it’s the other way around: demographically, civilizationally, linguistically, historically Russia is a colony of Ukraine. Russia is a poorly educated brat.

And not just that: Russia is, arguably, a degenerate form. Ukraine resisted the Mongols, and got defeated and devastated by them. Moscow then made peace, and collaborated, with the Mongols, and became like them. Just look at Putin, and in particular his slanted eyes: obviously his ancestors were in the sack with Mongols. Maybe Putin is so anxious to show himself a Russian patriot, because, like Lenin, he has slanted eyes? Maybe he wants to show that he is of pure, Russian, white essence?

This mock racist argument is not funny anymore when Putin’s most savage behavior is contemplated. Annexing territory is exactly what Mongols did.

If pacifists want to give Ukraine to Putin, they have to answer this: why?

Just because he wants it? So when the next Mafioso comes along and wants to kill ten million people, just because he wants it, they are going to agree?

At this point, our friends the pacifists look rather criminal. Let’s press them on. Let’s ask: ‘Does Putin wants all this property for the same reason as Hitler wanted the property of the Jews in 1938?”

What, say our friends the pacifists: history is not their forte. Indeed, Hitler attacked the Jews because his massive militarization program had impoverished Germany. He needed wealth and to look victorious.

So Putin is stealing Ukraine, because he wants to look like the one who brings, gifts, the one who augments. This is so true, Octavian, Caesar grand nephew, and heir, was named “Augustus”, the one who augments.

Putin augmented Russia, already Earth’s largest country, by a very long shot, by annexing Crimea. That made him “Augustus”. And 85% Russians now love him, because Putin has augmented their tiny minds. In part thanks to relentless propaganda.

We have seen that before, when all Germans loved Hitler, the more he used his propaganda on them. And even after millions of Germans had been killed, thanks to Hitler.

To be loved more, maybe Putin should kill more people, and even more Russians.

What else? Putin is remaking his entire military, all the way to nuclear forces, as if he knew world war was coming. It cost a gigantic amount of resources. So Russia is getting impoverished, and Putin has to look as the “Augmenter” the hard way: through massive theft.

This is exactly the politico-psychological process Hitler went through.

“Pacifists” said: let Hitler have the Jews, that’s what he wants. No French, British, let alone American, should die for Jews.

Hitler wanted the Austrian Republic? Let him have it. After all, Austria spoke German. Austrian Jews such as Freud could always go live in England. Less fortunate ones could go to Italy, or France.

So hear this, pacifists: there was a matter of principle: can we let the leader of a great nation use massive lethal force to steal massive property? Can we tolerate crimes against humanity?

And think a bit, pacifists: if stealing other countries alleviate the pain the attacking dictator would otherwise suffer, where does it stop?

Putin is the first to annex territory in Eurasia, since Hitler.

Some warn: don’t make Putin mad, he is Hitler, with nukes. Those who give the mad man a reason to attack are maniacs, culprit of war mongering.

Such pacifists are not really even arguing they are pacifists, just that they are cowards, and that cowardice is a most admirable strategy. Those peace mongers are not just dumb and self-satisfied, as usual pacifists are, but they aggravate their case by being cowardly, to the point of unreason.

Not provoking a mad man is no strategy. The question is why is the mad man becoming ever more mad? As I said above, it’s because the economy of his militarizing dictatorship is going down. He has to militarize, to create the impression that Russia, by far the largest country on Earth, is under attack: that activates the fascist reflex. All the Russian baboons then gather behind their chief, and do exactly what their chief is telling them to do. This insures the power of the chief.

Putin is sick, he has to be cured.

Question: why was Putin not acting like Hitler before? Because, before, he was afraid. Afraid of the power of the West. Now he is not. (I explained it had to do with not eliminating the criminal Assad personally; that too, let to the rise of extreme Islam fanatics; but there are other factors, such as a diminution of the military capability of the West, greatly caused by USA stealth planes not working, and Europeans doing austerity on defense… Except for neutral Sweden, which noticed Putin’s madness).

Then the question is this: did appeasers not learn history? Trying to make friends with evil does not just endanger peace, it’s a crime.

ELECTING EVIL IN ISRAEL? NOT CLEAR:

Israel is a case in many ways opposite to Russia. Israel is tiny, Russia 70% larger than the three largest countries after it (Canada, USA, China). Israel was founded by people whose country (Israel) was stolen by the fascist Roman state, as punishment for rebellion… But then the Catholics, such as “Saint” Augustine made a morality from what was meant as non-permanent situation.

Netanyahu (nicknamed “Bibi”) is running for re-election, and may well win. With his reassuring baritone. His brother, a crack commando commander, was the only fatality in the hyper daring Entebbe raid he led. Bibi is sort of extreme, he tends to King David’s Israel, the Greater Israel, with all the pesky Palestinians somewhere else. If wars come long and thick enough, the Greater Israel may well become a reality.

Differently from Putin’s mad dream of reconstituting what he calls the “Big Country” makes survival sense. Israel, as it is, is 1,100 times smaller than the empire Putin dreams aloud of.

Bibi can be a baby, as long as Arabs stay even more infantile. As it is, this cannot end well, so the party of Armageddon may as well rule. As long as some participant(s) is(are) looking for a final solution, the others may as well. One cannot make peace alone. But one can make war alone. Bibi is occupying a vacuum.

As long as Israel has good reason to fear for its survival, Bibi and, or, his ideas, and moods will rule. It’s a matter of survival, the best reason there ever was, for most people, most of the time.

Jordan got seriously angry against Daesh (aka “Islamic state”) and conducted air raids against it, after its young F16 pilot with green eyes got burned alive.

Jordan’s anger is healthy. It’s a change of values. The Middle East will bloom, if it aligns its values on the best ones the West ever offered. Look at China: why does it do so well? Because China adopted the high performance aspect of learning long championed, and monopolized, by the West.

Ultimately, the Chinese effort will fail, or, as in Germany a century ago, will have horribly deviant consequences, if it does not embrace the learning of criticism, that is, the learning of going meta, relative to the knowledge we have.

In either case, the West has to remember history, and roll back an educational system where real data is shown, and absorbed (especially at the meta level).

Much of the rise of plutocrats (including increasingly crazed maniac as Putin) is caused by an overall lack of education and a decrease capability to ascertain causation.

When pacifists believe that burrowing their heads in the sand works best to remove threats, they just lack education. There cannot be moralization without education.

Ideas give birth to moods, and moods lead to ideas, but ideas and moods are not interchangeable. If one wants to find out why people think the way they do, the distinction has to be kept in mind.

“Mike71” commenting on “No Taxation Without Decision” objects that: “Patrice, the one value, so little discussed above, is that of tolerance, allowing each individual to believe in any faith of their choice, or none at all… In the Libertarian ethic and tradition, becoming more widespread in the U.S., as well as abroad, the concept is that one should be able to do what they may, to the extent that it does not interfere with the rights of others.”

I have never said anything else. Moreover, making an ideology of “Liberty” (“Libertas” in Latin) is not new. Ever heard of: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité?

National Motto of France: Liberty First.

Notice that Liberté comes first, indeed. Including the liberty to caricature.

“Liberty consists of being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man or woman has no bounds other than those that guarantee other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights.”

Discours sur l’organisation des gardes nationales, Article XVI.

“On their chests will be engraved these words: FRENCH PEOPLE, & below: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. The same words are inscribed on flags which bear the three colors of the nation.”

[In 1792 and 1793, all plutocrats of Europe, and that means all other regimes of Europe, had attacked The French Republic in a giant coalition; internally, it caused the “Terror”; so “Ou La Mort” was dropped later, as it reminded The People of the Terror.]

Rome, the Roman Republic, was more “libertarian” for centuries than any regime since (except for the slaves, oops; there were private companies catching slaves, as in the Nineteenth Century USA, but even some that tortured and executed slaves for those who had the means to purchase their services).

Actually the Franks took control, and re-founded the decaying Roman State, starting in 400CE. “Frank” means “Free”. The main ideological effort of the Franks was to augment Freedom. Freedom fries did not start in 2003. Under the theocratic, Christian fanatical, fascist and plutocratic late Roman empire, Libertas was getting squeezed in all ways: individuals, Catholics or not, could be killed legally relatively easily, if they committed “blasphemy” against “Catholicism”, professions and social status tended to be inherited very rigidly, local democracy had disappeared, banditry and terror ruled (in part because the Catholics who ruled had replaced Roman law by Christian law)

The Franks threw the whole thing overboard: it was freedom everything… Except in military matters, where Roman military law was imposed ferociously (replacing the German anything-goes, we are all partners in crime). This is embodied by the famous story of the Vase de Soissons.

The rule of Liberty means the rule of tolerance. In particular, religious tolerance. The Franks re-established the rights of the Jews in the Sixth Century. In 1789 CE, 12 centuries later, the French Revolutionaries re-established again the rights of the Jews (which had been confiscated in the meantime by blood drenched monsters such as the fanatical “Saint” Louis).

Saint Louis was the first to claim he was tolerant, and good to the little guy. He just wanted to kill so bad miscreants such as Jews and the vaguely defined “Unbelievers” (“Incroyants”).

So, yes, of course, everybody worships “tolerance”, and “respect”. Actually that’s one of the preferred lines of Islamist fanatics, who always insist that Islam is all about “respect” and “tolerance” (they can find quotes to support that, in the Sacred texts, of course). But you see, “tolerance” is not a system of thoughts. It is a mood.

Systems of Thoughts, such as Christianism, Islamism, Stalinism, Maoism, erroneously named so-called “Liberalism”, “Capitalism” (whatever that means), Representative Democracy, etc. can all be criticized specifically.

In faulty systems of thoughts, one can point at specific lies. Lies by counterfactualism (outright lying), or by profound omission, or outright ignorance.

With system of moods, it’s a different matter entirely. How to criticize specifically an emotion? Take so-called “Islamophobia”: fear of Islam. How could such a mood be found to be faulty on a single statement? Moods are pretty impervious to logic. Phobias, when too acute, are just medical conditions.

Nobody, really is against “tolerance”. Nobody is against “democracy”, either. The Nazis used to joke they had “total democracy”. Don’t laugh: Hitler won referenda.

In the real world, there is force. Force is what rules reality. It’s a matter of physics, not history or wishful thinking. Physics is mostly about the description of forces in action.

Take an example: Israel. Israel and the context around it, is a ticking time bomb. A lot of potential energy is accumulated, getting ready to be unleashed with great force.

Israel knows well that some of its enemies will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against Israel. Half a dozen thermonuclear warheads well targeted (one on Haifa, three on the greater Tel Aviv, one on Jerusalem) would annihilate Israel, killing more Jews than the Nazis did.

And guess what? The Israelis have to take this into account. What to do? Wait placidly like sheep for extermination? It was tried last time, with the Nazis. It did not work too well: most European Jews were exterminated.

So the Israelis may well strike first.

Potentially, one is talking about tens of million killed, if not hundreds of millions.

In light of such realities, the realities of force, “tolerance” is deeply irrelevant.

(This is how Putin has always reasoned, force, and it has worked for him, as far as he is concerned. Similarly Obama used the force of deception to get where he is, and, just like Putin, he is happy like a clam.)

A mood such as tolerance is little in comparison to the moods the survivalist instinct leads to.

Freedom in the service of survival means to be free to annihilate the enemy. And tolerance means, in that vital context, to be ready to tolerate the infliction of evil. On others.

Dream states and wishful thinking are refreshing. However, when in action in the defense of one’s dear life, the brain switches to a completely different mode.

I have been there.

Once I was crossing a near vertical ice gully in flimsy rock climbing shoes. The belay was in the gully itself, protected by a rock. The anchors were not good, but the best I could do. As I was past the middle of the pitch, digging steps cautiously, I saw a giant rock avalanche coming. I ran (first impossible feat).

The some rocks hit the ropes, I was yanked off, and started to fall down the kilometer high gully. It was certain death. However, unbelievably, I was able to wedge myself between rock and ice. If I were into superstition, I would believe god personally intervened.

More prosaically, I believe that all my motor neurons got simultaneously activated, and inhuman strength was deployed with inhuman precision.

The brain, pushed into survival mode, is capable of unbelievable feats. And the first unbelievable feat, is how easily conventional morality, so-called humanism, ceases to be a factor.

Humanity exists, because of love. Otherwise there would be no children. And humanity also exists, because of its Dark Side. That is why humanity is so special. Humanity’s violent, omnipotent side: the Jewish god is in its image.

Are we ready to fight Putin to death? Or are we ready to live under the system of thoughts and moods the Russian dictator is generating, day after day? This is the sort of question, and the answers it led to, that have shaped human ethology for millions of years.

Want Liberty? Sell weapons to Ukraine. Do not repeat what was done in 1936, when France promised weapons to the Spanish Republic, and then backed-of, under British and American pressure.

The rest of the story? Mayhem in Spain, millions assassinated. Mayhem in Europe, 70 millions killed, most of them assassinated.

Liberty, or Death: that is not just the lesson of 1789, but also the lesson of Auschwitz.

I want to make sure I am not Politically Correct, every day, so I chose my words carefully… Political Correctness has established its empire on the ruins of Philosophical Correctness. But politics ought just to be practical philosophy, it cannot afford to contradict it.

I turned Deutsche Welle (German TV) on, and fell on a Jew talking at Auschwitz, inside what had to be the world’s most gigantic tent, draped with sumptuous blue lights. Zehr gut. Germans’ fate is now forever tied to Auschwitz, as the German president said. Studying Auschwitz ought to bring the final solution to much German ideology, including Kant, Herder, etc.

I switched to the French TV, and the same elder gentleman was here again, making the same discourse, and it was the same camera. I love it when Germans and French agree, about what is important, and it’s rarely not the case these days.

The speaker, an Auschwitz survivor, said words were important. To qualify those assassinated by the Nazis, one should speak of assassination, not “loss”. It’s not that we forgot about them, and we don’t know where they are. They were assassinated. I could not agree more. I have made that point in writing for years.

The French, German and Ukrainian president were in the audience. The day prior, a rocket attack on the large city of Mariopol had killed tens of civilians. The Organization of Stability and Security in Europe, and others, determined that the rockets came from the terrorist-Russian side. Asked about it the half demented Russian dictator, declared that a NATO “Foreign Legion” was causing mayhem in Ukraine. NATO replied that the only foreign legion in Ukraine was Russian. Putin confirmed that “patriotic volunteers” had crossed into Ukraine. He condemned “Russophobia”.

Putin did not go to the Auschwitz commemoration, pretexting he was not invited (nobody was; the event had been organized 9 years ago by the UN…)

Putin’s slow motion terror is a sight to behold. As I have explained, it was enabled by the last moment failure of a surgical strike against Bashar El Assad, personally and directly. Saudi (!) and French aircraft were on the runways, ready to take-off, but, at the last moment Obama lost his balls, and assassinated respect for the West’s military… With the failure to execute mass criminal Assad.

Assassination science is a complicated subject. Failure to assassinate here, will lead to assassination there.

The top German generals had decided to assassinate Hitler… They just needed British and American verbal support. Would the UK and the USA announce that they will stand publicly with France against Hitler? … Instead of siding with Hitler, as they had done so far? Then the generals, headed by chief of staff Beck, could make a coup, kill the top Nazis and argue to the Volk that it was a question of saving Germany from criminal madness.

Instead, the UK and USA governments betrayed humanity. They told Hitler that his generals, all his top generals, were plotting against him. That was in 1938. Beck was forced to resign, and to commit suicide in 1944 (after Beck headed the “Von Stauffenberg” coup).

The head of the World Jewish Congress talked. He accused “anti-Semitism”.

Word precision, please. Concept precision, please. Arabs are Semites. Many Arabs, if not most, detest Jews. So are Arabs detesting themselves? Of course not. So asking Arabs to fight “anti-Semitism” is like asking Americans to fight “anti-Americanism”. Silly, thus, ineffectual.

On January 21, 2015, French philosopher and plutocrat Bernard-Henri Levy told the 193-nation assembly that the world must confront “the renewed advance of this radical inhumanity, this total baseness that is anti-Semitism.”

This is complete madness, on the face of it. BHL wants us to become mad. Hamas has in its charter, Hadith 41;6985, which orders to kill all the Jews. Hamas rules Gaza, a city more than 2,000 years old… And Gaza is full of Semites. Bombed by would-be Semites, the Jews of Israel. When BH Levy tells the inhabitants of Gaza to renounce “anti-Semitism”, they can only feel that he is mad. Or that he views them as subhumans (as BHL recognizes only Jews as Semites, thus Gaza denizens as non-Semites, thus as having no identity, since BHL amputates them from their very existence!)

I said “would-be Semites” because, ironically, as Christians could convert to Judaism for centuries under the very long lived Franco-Roman empire, many European Jews were actually, first, of European descent. (Several top Nazis were themselves more or less of European Jewish descent; Hitler himself was a dubious case; he made thousands of German Jews, “honorary Aryans”.)

The World Jewish Congress head accused “most nations of Europe” to be culprit of Auschwitz. Not one word about the USA. Yet, the USA was more culprit of the massacre of the Jews than any other nation, barred Germany itself. We are in 2015. How much longer do we have to wait for this basic truth? The fact is both instructive, and a warning.

Not only did the USA refuse to accept Jewish refugees (so millions, blocked from immigration, were killed in Europe; France, by contrast, had open borders). But American managers, such as Prescott Bush, managed the slave labor from the Auschwitz archipelago. That was obliterated by the official version of history, as was the employ, at the highest levels (the Dulles heads of CIA, State), of many Nazis and Nazi collaborators, all powerful in the USA, not just in the 1930s, but also in the 1950s…

By not mentioning any of this, the head of the World Jewish Congress makes himself an accomplice of the most important enabling factor of the Shoah.

Who learned nothing?

The Arabs, accused to be “anti-Semites”? Or those who play dumb, 80 years later? And still can’t make the connection between the fact Obama was in Saudi Arabia, making oil plots, and not joining with 30 heads of states in Auschwitz (not anymore than he was in France two weeks earlier to demonstrate for Freedom of Expression).

The head of the World Jewish Congress should call a cat a cat, instead of calling cats “anti-cats”. What he should have bemoaned is “anti-JUDAISM”.

He then bemoaned Jews could go around Paris with a Kippah. Sure. Let’s have everybody walk around in big religious garb, hoping for the best. Time for a bit of sensitivity, perhaps? The latest activities by Israel in Gaza killed around 2,300 people (most of them civilians… even according to Israel!)… And wounded more than 10,000. That’s a lot of dead and wounded for a population of 1.8 million (more or less caged, thanks to Egypt and Israel).

Scaled up to the USA, that would be more than 400,000 dead… An astounding number.

More generally, Judaism gave us Christiano-Islamism. It’s supposed to be a great gift. However, Christianism took over the Roman empire by 400 CE (that’s when Roman emperor Theodosius had to be beg forgiveness on his knees to the archbishop of Milan, one of the so-called Church’s Founding Fathers).

The government by bishops, for bishops, did not just collapse the empire, it collapsed civilization, and even demography. The Franks took over a devastated Europe, created their own bishops, and their own saints, and their own interpretation of Christianism. Then they domesticated the Popes.

Something similar happened with Islam. After the Islamists took military control, they proved incapable to come to terms with secularism, which is the condition sine qua non for civilization.

Thus, centuries later, after most of the population converted and was submitted to Sharia instead of secular law, civilization became moribund, and has been thus ever since.

Not to be left behind, Christian madness made a comeback after the First Crusade (1099 CE), and brought crusades, pogroms, Inquisition, ethnic cleansing, Jewish and Muslim eradication, for centuries to come. This was no small stuff: the crusade against the Cathars killed millions (scaled to the populations, it’s worse than what the Nazis did; indeed the Cathars were killed to the last, and all their works, but one, or so)

Hence Judeo-Christo-Islamism stinks to high heavens most of the time. It keeps on being re-captured (surprise, surprise), by Elected People theoreticians… Come to think of it, that, and the respect for a crazed, bloodthirsty god, is the very basis of the doctrine…

Maybe Jews would be well advised to understand that their problems, just as those of Islam, originate greatly from their religion. It’s OK, to change religion: Gallia changed religion, getting ever more secular, no less than four times in 2,000 years (from the Celtic human sacrifice cult, to Roman cult, to Christianism, to now Secularism).

The Promised Land ideology allowed to give the inspiration and religious backing for the North American Euro colonists to eradicate the Natives, following what they read in the Bible. So the Bible is still very popular in the USA: it made Americans not just feeling good about themselves, but awesomely rich: by the Nineteenth Century, an American going west was a multimillionaire, thanks to the Bible propelled government’s generosity.

Apologists will say it’s not so much the Promised-Land greed, but the Ten Commandments which are the core of the Biblical doctrine. That was not very useful when the Germans got angry.

Indeed, as one of the Auschwitz survivors just said: One needs an Eleventh Commandment: Don’t Be Just a Spectator.

Even more important: have your own ideas. Parrots make poor thinkers. Poor thinking makes you dinner.

There cannot be peace in the Middle East, as long as Islam is the dominant system of mood. Islam started as an anti-Jewish machine: Muhammad turned against his hosts, who had inspired him, and massacred an entire tribe in mostly Jewish Yathrib (thereafter to be called Medina, the second most sacred city in Islam).

Faithfully following Roman and Roman Catholic genocidal fascism, Islam put its foot on Jerusalem’s bloodied face, insulting it as the third most sacred city in Islam:

Dome Of The Rock Mosque Squats Obnoxiously On Jewish Temple Mont

In 1217 CE, Spanish Rabbi Judah al-Harizi found the sight of the Muslim fortifications on the Jewish Temple Mount profoundly disturbing. “What torment to see our holy courts converted into an alien temple!”

Jerusalem had been the capital of various Jewish states for about 2,000 years. 2,000 years prior to the invention of Islam.

Islam has no less than two mosques on top of the most sacred place of Judaism. Those mosques were built (late 8th C), 13 (yes, thirteen) centuries after the destruction of the first Jewish temple by the Babylonians. It’s worse than rising mosques on top of a razed Notre Dame, while calling Paris the fourth most sacred city in Islam.

Muhammad is supposed to have taken flight from there, the Jewish Temple mount, in an apparent imitation of the thoroughly undocumented Christ (many turkeys fly from the same spot). The vampire gorged on blood takes flight from the neck of its victim.

Islam was also an anti-Western war machine, and, as long as it functions as a dominant mode of thinking of Middle Earth, and the West has not been defeated, there will be war. We have plenty of (sacred) statements in the Hadith about attacking the West deliberately. Bukhari is the second most authoritative source in Islam after the Qur’an:

“He heard the Prophet saying, ‘Paradise is granted to the first batch of my followers who will undertake a naval expedition.’ The Prophet then said, ‘The first army amongst my followers who will invade Caesar’s City will be forgiven their sins.'”[Bukhari:V4B52N175]

So much for Islam being a religion of peace. Muslims sieged Constantinople three times: 674-678 CE, 717-718 CE, and 1453 CE.

On August 28, 846 CE an Arab army invaded Rome by surprise, and took over the Vatican. Yes, the Muslims succeeded where Hannibal had failed. One never talks about it, prefering to call attention to Hannibal and the Crusades, always (an obvious bias in context building!). This attack on Rome was no joke: the Frankish army holding north-west Rome and the Vatican was killed to the last man. The Muslims in and around Rome were repelled after hard fighting over several months, by Frankish relief armies.

Arab invasions rolled over Europe for 1,000 years, coming not far from Paris more than once, sieging Vienna, twice, occupying Saint Tropez, much of Provence, Switzerland, Greece, much of Italy, for decades, sometimes centuries… Exerting their obnoxious oppression all along (non Muslims were strongly discriminated against, in many ways, and had to submit, lest they would be summarily executed; marks on clothing akin to the Nazis’ yellow star had to be worn by the non Muslims; Muslim warriors could grab maidens and decide that was a “battlefield marriage” [institutionalized rape] but non Muslims men could not marry a Muslim, something true to this day, etc.).

“The Prophet said, ‘Khosrau will be ruined. There won’t be a Persian King after him. Caesar will be ruined. There will be no Caesar after him. You will spend their treasures in Allah’s Cause.’ He proclaimed, ‘War is deceit.’“[Bukhari:V4B52N267]

“Umar [the Second Caliph] sent Muslims to great countries to fight pagans. He said, ‘I intend to invade Persia and Rome.’ So, he ordered us to go to [the Persian King] Khosrau. When we reached the enemy, Khosrau’s representative came out with 40,000 warriors, saying, ‘Talk to me! Who are you?’ Mughira replied, ‘We are Arabs; we led a hard, miserable, disastrous life. We used to worship trees and stones. While we were in this state, our Prophet, the Messenger of our Lord, ordered us to fight you till you worship Allah Alone or pay us the Jizyah tribute tax in submission. Our Prophet has informed us that our Lord says: ‘Whoever amongst us is killed as a martyr shall go to Paradise to lead such a luxurious life as he has never seen, and whoever survives shall become your master.'” [Bukhari:V4B53N386]

It’s all about the luxurious life: be a martyr, and luxury is yours, you greedy murderous ones! It’s not me parodying Islam saying this. It’s the most sacred texts of Islam defining Islam thus. Notice the quotes are long, their contexts clear. But we have to be careful: nowadays, just describing the Prophet, as he is described in the Qur’an and the Hadith, is viewed as a grave insult against the prophet, even if all and any Muslim scholars know these very things are the basics of the Islamist faith. In other words, Islamist “scholars” view Islam as an insult against islam, as long as it is described by non Muslims.

For all the pillow talk about peace in the Middle East, Islam is the pachyderm from hell breathing over the bed in the room above the whispering lovers. The Middle East has not yet been separated from its local, plutocratic friendly, superstition, Islam. Islam, as it is, truly, not as it is hoped to be by pseudo-progressives who have made a business model from mouthing wishful thinking, as a form of soft intellectual fascism.

Let’s all read the Qur’an, line by line. It’s only 80,000 words, everybody, even pseudo-progressives, with their tiny brains, could do it. Maybe too busy self caressing pseudo-progressives are?

What do we see in the Qur’an? A repetitive litany of lethal or abusive orders (from God, no less!) many victimizing people who are accused of misinterpreting God, such as the Jews, Christians, ill defined “unbelievers”, etc.

Apparently unsatisfied with murderously intolerant fanaticism, the Qur’an is clearly not friendly to democracy. Allah wants the faithful to obey whoever detains power: “O Ye Who Believe! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” (Sura 4; verse 59).”

Thus the Qur’an makes fascism part of worship. No wonder all leaders in Islamist countries become dictators (even Erdogan in Turkey is trying his best).

Thus Islam or democracy and peace? That is the question in the Middle East, still stuck in theocracy, 13 centuries and going strong.

***

WHEN EUROPE WAS UNDER THE SPELL OF WOULD BE CHILD ASSASSIN ABRAHAM, IT WAS NOT PRETTY EITHER:

Superstition going crazy is not confined to the Middle East. Europe has know two phases of murderous insane superstitionism. The first religious madness put an end to Romanitas, an ill fated, all too restrictive society that could survive only by ever augmenting its fascism, while fragmenting into mini tyrannies from local plutocrats.

Diseased Romanitas was replaced by the more advanced Frankish philosophy which included in the power structure of society Jews, Pagans, women, all sorts of Germans, Romans, and even the ex-slaves.

The ugly oppression of the Abrahamic religion went into an eclipse that lasted six centuries. (Nothing symbolized it better than the nationalization of the church by Charles Martel around 730 CE!)

However, the Crusades allowed Abraham to rise its ugly snout again. The cult of a child molester does the plutocratic mood wonders. One Crusade, in France, killed one million. One million French. Or more. For five or six centuries plutocrats, hiding behind Abraham’s throat cutting ways, were at each others’ throats.

The Europe was torn by terrible religious wars over a century centered on 1600 CE. France had no less than eight religious wars at the end of the 16th Century.

Some of these wars caused the death of more than 30% of the population. Before weapons of mass destruction. Finally central governments won the struggle, and took over, re-birthing (re-naissance) the Roman style command and control.

The religious murderous madness was stopped when religion got defanged, and rigorously separated from the state, while the Republic became the ruling religion. Not yet the case in the Middle East… Except for Israel (paradoxically).

***

CLASH OF A SUPERSTITION WITH CIVILIZATION:

Make no mistake: between Israel and the Arabs, at this point, it is still a religious war. No peace is possible as long as temple based terrorism lurks above.

The Economist, in an orgasm of naivety, urges Obama to do something about Israel and Palestine. But what to do against superstition and fanaticism? It’s a philosopher’s task. The best one can expect from Obama is Machiavellism. And we are getting some.

Obama is right to not squander his time splitting superstitious hair in a finer way than the fanatical participants already do. Obama got involved, sure. Obama very wisely decided that the USA would finance most of the Iron Dome (in exchange for a technology transfer!). It was wise. Iron Dome, and the coming David Sling will do more to calm down fascism, than soothing words of debasing appeasement.

Once democracy, the people, rules, there will be peace. But the people has existed for a million years, and the Republic is its basic religion, its basic atavism. No objective observer can say it is compatible with burning people for all the litany of reasons found in the Qur’an.

Seven centuries ago, in Egypt, interpreting the Qur’an literally was punished with imprisonment. Time to reboot that, if peace is really what one is after.

***

QUR’AN BAD, BIBLE WORSE: SO?

The Economist published my comment above. The anonymous L6QjhvJGVkin reply to Tyranosopher Nov 23rd, came up with a number of interesting quotes of the Bible. Said he: “Although I am not religious (as an agnostic), the Koran is very mild compared to the Bible.”

Right, L6QjhvJGVk, but the Bible does not have more than a billion fanatical followers, today. Literal Bible reading is mostly a problem confined to places in Russia, the USA and Israel. One can spit all day long on the Bible, and burn it with gusto. All that will happen is that one will not be taken seriously. But in Muslim lands, it’s quite the opposite, one is taken all too seriously. Doing symbolic violence to the Qur’an hate book may get you executed. Once somebody was condemned to death, in a Muslim country, for having said something unbecoming about Jesus (!), a prophet of Islam.

Even in countries such as France, supposedly philosophically enlightened, there is a dangerous confusion between criticizing a religion, and racial hatred (are the somewhat Christianophobic, such as me, hating the Christian race?). This legal confusion has had very practical, very disastrous consequences. It enabled the growth of Muslim Fundamentalism of the lethal type, because criticizing the Qur’an, arguably a hate book if there ever has been one, has been equated to racism. Thus Quranic violence was made into something sacred.

It is a bit of a paradox that it is honorable to kill bin Laden, but not to trash his ideas! In contrast, I believe that the best way to kill inferior ideas is with superior ideas.

L6QjhvJGVk Bible and Jewish quotes are reproduced in the comments (however, within them L6QjhvJGVk exhibits plain anti-Judaism, Nazi style, as he evokes a word Hitler used, “genetic” in derogatory relation to the Jews, showing an emotional anti-Jew slant).

“There is no comparison [between following the Bible and being submitted to the Qur’an]. The Bible is advisory and there are no penalties to deny or question it. Islam requires a total belief in the whole of the Koran as directly written by Allah. To question it or to deny it is apostasy the penalty for which is death. This can tend to remove the chance to discuss things rationally. The poor performance, educationally, socially and economically of Muslims is, I believe hindered by the absolving of personal responsibility with the need to suffix every statement with Inshallah, if God wills it, in my experience he seldom does. My Muslin dentist tells me the world in 6000 years old, as stated in the Koran – well this could explain the dearth of Nobel Scientific awards to Muslims. Oh for the enlightenment!”

I agree 100% with Left and Right. Except that the Roman emperors, even before Theodosius, imposed Catholic terror (loosely based on the New Testament).

The reason for constant Muslim civil wars of the worst type is precisely that to question the other believer’s interpretation of the Qur’an or to deny it is apostasy, as far as the other believer is concerned, the penalty for which is death. Hence the total intolerance of Muslim: just draw a guy with a turban, call it Muhammad, see what happens. You may not have time to put it below foot. Thus the Dome of the Rock’s location is a well understood insult.

“You overlook that the portions of these religious books that reflect values from another time are dead as a doornail in Judaism and in Israel, a modern state with modern values, and alive and well under Islamist states, whose leadership believes that it should all be kept alive, just as it was written.”

***

Thank you L6QjhvJGVk, for rolling out barbarity from the Bible, there are never enough rivers of obnoxious data flowing to nourish the humanistic, progressive ocean!

The Abrahamic religion has to be crushed always. A state came up with the following law: “The safety and security of the Commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.” Those who disagree are to be sent to jail 12 months. That’s the law since before 2006, when the Supreme Court of that state refused to consider its constitutionality. So it is in Kentucky, USA.

If the Abrahamists, with their psycho god, are not crushed there, they will grow under the sign of the beast, and eat civilization up, as they did in the East. As when Bush brandished Qur’an and Bible to bring the true faith to Iraq (in his self described “crusade“).

Islamism is just a variant, an heresy of Judaism, somewhat desertified, somewhat Christianized, somewhat modernized. So if the Bible is really bad, it’s only natural that the Qur’an would be so too. Since the latter mostly apes the former.

(The holly Qur’an can be innovative, though: Apparently Muhammad conceived of stem cells, demonstrating how wise he was! Qur’an Surah 4, Verse 56: “Indeed, those who disbelieve in Our verses – We will drive them into a Fire. Every time their skins are roasted through We will replace them with other skins so they may taste the punishment again. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted in Might and Wise.”)

As a self declared follower of the Abrahamic religion, the Prophet venerated the Bible, and his beef with the Jews was that they did not follow the Bible rigorously enough.

That the Bible was grotesquely dangerous, and immoral, interpreted literally has been known since the birth of Christianity.

Wrote Augustine: Title of Book III, Chapter 5 of his famous City of God”. “It Is A Wretched Slavery Which Takes The Figurative Expressions of Scripture in A Literal Sense.”

In spite of this, Augustine was the first theoretician of the dispersal of the Jews out of Israel, thus causing their departure, followed by their subsequent return…

Of course Augustine (around 400 CE) was following emperor Hadrian’s decrees against the Jews, like the dog follows his master. After the second Jewish revolt, in 132 CE, the Romans defeated the Jewish army in 135 CE.

Thereupon, Jerusalem, the capital of he Jews, was turned into a Greco-Roman city called Aelia Capitolina. A temple of Jupiter was built on top of the Jewish Temple, razed by the Romans.

Thus the idea of putting the enormous Dome of the Rock in place of the Temple is a Roman fascist idea that has become sacred to Muslims! In other words, of Rome, Muslims worship the worst. Another troubling fact, is that the Temple Mount is also considered to be Mount Zion. does that mean that, by worshipping the Dome of the Rock (roughly the oldest mosque), Muslims are Zionists? In some sense?

Emperor Hadrian forbid to the Jews to live in Jerusalem. Hadrian changed the country’s name from Judea to Syria Palestina. United Nations, version 135 CE.

However, these atrocious facts over which the otherwise much esteemed Hadrian presided, got to be known, and taken for what they were, in the fullness of time: genocide.
By 1948 CE, the United Nations, a sort of modernized Rome (before the Roman Republic became an outright imperium), decided to undo the horror visited by Hadrian, and more or less enforced ever since.

Actually the UN followed a Roman precedent. Emperor Julian, philosopher and critique of the monstrosity of the rule of Catholicism, had ordered the RECONSTRUCTION of the Jewish Temple in 360 CE (earthquakes, and Christian fanaticism, including the assassination of Julian, prevented the work to proceed!)

So here we are. In the last seven years, the Palestinians have fired nearly 7,000 rockets at Israel, killing 51 Israelis, and losing nearly 3,200 of their own. “Israel is gaining time… cutting the grass“, as Israelis put it. The time Israel did not have in 132-135 CE.

History never dies. Only armies do.

Why don’t Muslims eat pigs? The first order explanation, like for most things Muslim is that, so it was in the Bible, and Muslims follow the Bible, when in doubt. More sophisticated was Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher under the Caliphate, physician to Saladin in the Twelfth Century. He understood the dietary laws chiefly as keeping the body healthy. The meat of the forbidden animals, birds, and fish was indigestible, according to Maimonides. However this does not apply to pork, he observed. But pigs are more dirty than human latrines, so had to be avoided, he obviated.

A beauty of Islam is that it has no centralized authority as far as what it truly says. As the Qur’an is very small, it has been supplemented by all sorts of books and gossip, the Sunnah and Hadith being the most prominent. Muslims tend to kill each other, because they differ about the authors of Hadith who are viewed as reputable. Or by how seriously they take this and that gossip (= “reputable authority“, a frequently used notion in Islam scholarship).

On top of that, local traditions have their own little stories. Once I asked a knowledgeable woman in Africa, a Muslim religious authority, why Muslims did not eat pigs.

She told me a story I have never come across again. She told me that once Muhammad and his army, in a forest, got very thirsty. Then they saw a pig. They followed it until it reached water. Thereafter, a grateful Muhammad ordered his followers to give pigs a chance.

The surrealism of it all left me speechless. So some black Africans hold that Muslims follow the one who followed the pig? It’s unlikely that blindly following the One who followed the pig will give peace a chance, because he gave pigs a chance. The fascist instinct, that is, following The One, in this case a long dead analphabet raider, blindly, is exactly the opposite of peace, pigs or no pigs.

Yesterday’s god, like yesterday’s history, is senile, incoherent, repetitive, and dangerous. Time to break the cycle. Otherwise, there is an Iron Dome to show you.
***

1) What the economy truly is, and why the USA not understanding this is causing the present malaise.

2) God as a big, bad, dad… Is believing in God a form of infantilism?

3) The strange, obdurate story of Israel, or why, relatively speaking, there are always fewer Jews. Intolerance and exclusionism do not bring understanding, oneself, or others.

4) Speaking of religious apartheid, Pakistan is, conceptually speaking, a child of Israel. OK, some are going to resent that remark. They also have a common Achilles’ heel, namely beng on the (bankrupt) USA payroll.

5) A set of nuclear reactors at Hamaoka in Japan, 190 kilometers from Tokyo, is being shut down, to build tsunami defenses. They are on a very narrow peninsula, with a government prediction of 87% probability of an 8 Richter within three decades. How insane could deciders be?

6) Radioactivity, we can leave with, to some extent. Mercury, not so, to the present extent. Why can’t ecologists understand this? Is it because too many of them are anti-technological, thus anti-scientific, thus anti-rational?

7) Messing up with Iraq, has not started to backfire yet, for the USA. But it will. The USA started, unwittingly, the reunification of Iraq and Iran.

8) The notion of “conspiracy” is weaker, and thus more general, than that of “plot”. As the USA keeps broadcasting to the world its notions of justice, one week bin Laden is dispatched, another Strauss-Kahn humiliated as a “perpetrator”, there will be consequences. When they come, the food stamp country will not know what hit it (47 million food stamp recipients in the USA, speaking of humiliation).

***

***

Managing A House Is More Than Letting Greed Run Amok:

The ruling economic orthodoxy in the USA is that all the economy needs is greed. 1960s:”All You Need Is Love!“. Fifty years later:”All You Need Is Greed!” That fits plutocracy just fine, thank you. (However, the élucubrations of the director of the IMF about the need for more state regulations, were just insufferable. Hopefully that has been fixed in the usual manner…)

The sociopaths who lead America into oblivion do not know, nor want to know, nor want to consider, that greed is only one human motivation among others. By considering, at the outset, that those other motivations are not generators of economic activity, the plutocratic orthodoxy impoverish the notion of economy (= housemanagement). No wonder the socioeconomies they manage have always tended to go down (Sparta, Macedonia, all Muslim countries are example, in the fullness of history). Its theory and practice of the dismal science is exerted on a body politics that they mutilate themselves.

Thus democracy does not just provide with superior intelligence, but also with a superior economy.

(Islam and its Golden Age, Constantinople and its Roman empire, China, all dictatorial and very wealthy seem to be counter-examples… But a detailed examination show that they achieved much less than their potential. Actually they all failed spectacularly, as they were unable to sustain enough of a socioeconomic effort to hold off enemies which wiped them out, or turned them into shadows of their former selves… as happen twice to China in 400 years).

Taxes allow to finance economic activities not sensitive to greed.Thus, by shrinking taxes too much, one shrinks the huge part of the economy for which greed cannot be a motivation. Care, for example, is in another dimension than greed. So are science, philosophy, poetry, and most of the noblest arts of the human spirit. So is education, so are so many of the life giving arts.

One will not provide the best care, because one is the most greedy. Worse: selecting individuals and organizations on the basis of greed to provide care insures failure. Indeed, care and greed live in different parts of the brain.

The failure to understand that basic neurobiological fact, the failure to understand that loving someone else, is different from sucking all the life blood from a creature, explains why the USA is turning into an economic black hole.

The USA, and the UK, are both obsessed by destroying off the non greed based economy. They are doing a good job of destruction. The latest numbers show that their economies are keeling over. Whereas France and Germany, havens of central planning and high taxes, are expanding at a hefty clip… In spite of a currency (the euro) which has been overvalued by as much as 50% in the last quarter (thus damaging what is by far the world greatest exporting economy, that of the Eurozone). Let me rephrase this: the dollar has been at the bottom, uncomfortably close to the breaking point.

Let us be fair. The USA has automatic stabilizers. California will close 70 (yes, seventy) state parks (hey, it will allow to “fire” 220 state employees, realizing enormous savings). Thus hungry Californians will be able to go scavenge in the forests, come next winter. If only one legalized cannibalism, think of all the savings!

***

My Dad Is Bigger Than Yours, Let’s Call Him God:

The mysterious concept of “God” is very handy. First it allows to confuse debates. Indeed, in an important a way, “God” is the pseudonym of many a creature. “God” the pseudonym hides various actors, often with wildly antagonistic minds. So its use makes debates more ill defined than they would be otherwise. Let me explain: when Obama speaks of God, and say some religious fundamentalists do not speak of “God” correctly, it is more than just ludicrous. It’s typical. Obama and the religious fundamentalists he disagrees with do not mean the same thing by “God”.

Second, those with a bigger, better, badder god are obviously endowed with a bigger, better, badder dad. So they feel more powerful, and this display of confidence may induce others to feel that they are more powerful too. So these metaphysics of power have consequences on power in real life.

***

Will Israel Survive?

OK, with nuclear weapons, anything can happen. Granted. Nuclear weapons could insure the survival of Israel. Entire populations could be exterminated, at the rate of a few Auschwitz a minute. So maybe Israelis some day will come out of their fortified burrows over radioactive ruins, lonely survivors of a Mid-East turned to a fine crisp. Think about all the West Banks to settle with men in black (radiation) suits… Think of King David’s kingdom, throughout the Fertile crescent… Hope springs eternal…

However, adverse developments, adverse from the Zionist point of view, that is, such as universal nuclear weapons’ disarmament and generalized peace are to be feared. In theory, generalized nuclear disarmament has been launched. But not for Pakistan, which makes at least a new thermonuclear bomb, every week, and maybe much more. By making Armageddon more likely, Pakistan is the best future many nuts in Israel can hope for.

Einstein refused the (first) presidency of Israel. Although he hated the Germans by then, and reproached heavily Born (fellow Quantum Nobel physicist) to go back to Germany for retirement, he could only espouse the natural position of those who have looked at hatred and exclusion in the eye.

The (Jewish German) philosopher Isaac Berlin summed the creation of Israel this way:”They did not listen to us. They listened to Hitler.”

Similarly Obama, in the guise of killing him, listened to Osama’s notion of justice:”Whatever we say it is”. When a conflict there is, one conventionally looks at who won. The more sophisticated approach to conflicts is to look at which system of thought won.

The case of Israel is curious, and enlightening in the greatest scheme of history. At the time when Judea rebelled, most Jews did not. Maybe 15% of the Roman empire population was Jewish (more than 10 million, and much more than there were Celts, as those suffered heavy losses at the hands of legions, besides more than a million sent as slaves to Rome, after Caesar’s bellum gallicum).

The Judea war killed may be a million Jews (in multiple way fighting, as the war against Rome was augmented by a war of various fanatical sects against each other). However, the Jewish religion was not outlawed by the Romans (instead it had a covenant with Rome, and Saint Paul was prosecuted for having violated Jewish religious law, as he went into the temple with a bodyguard who was not Jewish).

Meanwhile, the Celtic religion was outlawed (basically for crimes against mankind, to put it in contemporary terms). But the Celts stayed where they were. And last observed, restrict their inheritance to music, and being themselves. Curiously, for about 5 centuries, the Celts were the greatest enemies of Rome, and, later, in collaboration with the Franks, and other Germans, pretty much subdued Rome.

Lesson? Clinging to one’s superstition is apparently not the best way to impose oneself. The best way may be sometimes to accommodate the oppressor, collaborate, pick up the best it has to offer, and use it for intellectual assist. Out of the Roman occupation, the Celto-Germans made a superior civilization (thus, when Julian came to direct the legions in Gallia and Germania, the Parisians showed him the way, in the end proclaiming him Augustus).

A few rebellions later, and thanks to the tender mercies of Christianism, founded by a number of Jews who did not like Jews, the Jews got chased from Judea.

The question of Israel, if one listens to Orthodox Jews, boils down to this: should we make a refuge for each and every single religion? A refuge where those who are not of the religion are not full citizen, or not viewed as human, in other words? 25% of the population of Israel right now is not Jewish… Shall they be expelled?

It may be wiser to remember that “Outremer” and the kingdom of Jerusalem, the kingdoms and principalities founded by the Franks in the Orient lasted mostly a century. Two centuries at most. Why? They cost too much, and were not profitable, especially in light of negotiations with Muslims such as Saladin, which resulted in a significant and durable decrease of tension.

Israel is presently kept afloat by enormous financial help, direct and indirect (through Egypt), from the USA, plus the fact that the USA trains, equip and hypnotize the Egyptian army, and the Saudi plutocracy. If this contraption goes, can Israel do better than “Outremer”?

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How Did Pakistan Come To Be?

Heard on a French speaking TV (I don’t remember from where): “Pakistan is the fruit of the colonial past“. Sure. That, hail storms, malaria, and slavery, have got to have originated with colonialism. When something is wrong, blame the colonialists. Especially in India, where there were no colons. (India, was sometimes “ruled” with as little as 1,500 British civil servants; not to say that Britain did not behave in a thugish fashion in multiple ways; but, overall, the influence of Britannia was good).

Claiming that Pakistan was engineered by the colonialists: nothing could be further from the truth. The British had united India, or, more exactly, the Raj.

Previously, the Mughal Raj, starting in 1526 CE, had united most of what would become the British Raj, plus Afghanistan, and minus the extreme south of the subcontinent. The (Islamized) Moguls were not from South Asia, but of Turco-Mongol origin. The Mughal empire is also known as the Timurid dynasty, as its founder Babur descended from Timur (a ferocious, conquering Mongol, but not the partly civilizing force that Genghis Khan had been). The Mughal empire disintegrated mostly on its own, two centuries later. The British had little to do with it, and their rule was nice, in comparison.

The British civilized India, after millennia of racial apartheid stagnation. They made reason more prevalent.

The creation of states on the ground of religious appurtenance in India, post independence from Britain has been just the opposite. Building a religious state was a fundamental takeover of humanitarian principle by gross superstition. By definition superstitious religions such as Islam or Hinduism (and various variants) stand above the real world. That means they stand above reason; that is they founding mental act: “We believe a number of things which make no sense, therefore we are more important than sense itself“. In other words, common people and their common sense make no sense, only the theocrats makes sense. In the case of Pakistan, a small group of adventurers used religion as a pretext to justify their rule.

Who decides upon religious appurtenance? Well the proverbial commander of the faithful. The one who send the death commandos, the Caliph, the maximum terror chief, the one who tells you when “Justice Has Been Done“.

Gandhi was the main force behind apartheid in India: he initialized it, by extolling Hinduism. Gandhi was the anti-Mandela. True, he did not commit the irreparable, as the Muslim leaders did, but he instigated it. At the end of his life, Gandhi no doubt preferred to die, rather than to contemplate what he had done.

In a sense, Gandhi was one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest racists (no wonder Hitler was his “friend”). People of his sort claims that Hindu apartheid, being religious, is not racial. Logics demonstrates otherwise, and recent genetic studies have confirmed that.

Pakistan was founded on the same principle as Israel: “our God rules, he rules us, and even you, so get out!” Universal Human Rights will have to rule over all these little ‘hoods divinities, though, if most of us want to survive, and it would be better for all these little ‘hoods to understand this in a timely manner.

***

What We Don’t See Can’t Hurt Us:

On the narrow tip of the Tokai peninsula, two plates meet. On one side a bay, on the other, the Pacific ocean. Best place to build nuclear reactors of course. Right on top of the fault. The fault between the two plates.

Don’t worry: a 6 meter tall sand dune was installed, to protect against the six meter tsunami. There is probably a local tradition that tsunamis are polite, bow and make themselves less than 6 meters high. Not all tsunamis are as gross as the one of March 2011, whose wave crested at 42 meters.

That tsunamis be polite and bow low is all the more important that a fabulous megathrust Richter quake is expected, anytime, on the triple plate junction just south, or on the other one, 200 kilometers east. An embarrassment of very moving riches. As I said there are nuclear reactors there, by the beaches. The beaches, which are on both sides. Fun never stops. (Latest news: as of mid May, the nuclear fission is being stopped so that the plant can be made more resistant to quakes and tsunamis.)

Point to be meditated upon: when the Japanese nuclear plants were built, seismic activity was low in Japan. Looking at history shows that seismic activity is concentrated in space and time. Haiti had a lot of very bad quakes in the 18C. Then nothing until recently. Right now the entire Pacific plate seems to be in play, from one side to the other. But the Americans cannot notice such as thing: it would be anti-American, say those who don’t want Americans to work (as the key to the plutocrats’ peace is an unemployed population).

The Chernobyl reactors had no confinement, and were of an extremely dangerous type, which explode when coolant leaks (whereas a PWR loses nuclear fission, as its neutrons are going too fast to be captured, when it loses coolant/water). Both characteristics should be totally unlawful, by international law. Before the famous explosion (of reactor 4), at Chernobyl, reactor 1 had a partial meltdown, and then was refurbished. Three of the crazy reactors at Chernobyl kept operating at the site for up to 14 years… After the famous disaster.

***

Some Hate What They Don’t Understand:

Burning coal is the leading cause of human-caused global warming. But did you know that coal-fired power plants are also the single largest source of mercury pollution in much of the world? Coal burning in China creates mercury vapor, which condensates over the Arctic, making wildlife there increasingly poisonous. China accounts for about half of the world’s emissions of mercury. As I hold that China is the USA in drags, it ought to be the responsibility of American politicians to push for a resolution of this. American corporations make pile of money by using mercury laced cheap Chinese energy (the rest of the world has taken anti-mercury measures).

The not-yet-born, and infants are especially susceptible to mercury exposure. Mercury vapor released into the atmosphere settles into rivers, lakes and oceans, where it is absorbed and ingested by fish. When expectant mothers eat the tainted fish, they pass the mercury on to their children. One in six U.S. women of childbearing age have enough mercury in their bodies to harm a pregnancy. annual mercury emissions have increased two to five fold within the last century, with anthropogenic emissions now surpassing natural emissions in the industrialized world. Annual mercury emissions have increased two to five fold within the last century. They come mostly from a mineral (HgS) found naturally in fossil fuel, especially coal. Methyl mercury piles up in fatty tissues, and is not eliminated, so it concentrates up the food chain, from small fish to man.

Compare this enormous, worldwide mercury disaster, with the obsession with the dangers of nuclear power. True, nearly all existing nuclear power plants should be seriously refurbished, or replaced. They are not safe. Technology to make nuclear plants much safer not only exists, but is for sale.

In particular most of the plants in Japan should be scrapped or seriously worked on. But the fact is that, even nuclear power plants which have been constructed in the most dangerous fashion, and should never have been allowed to operate, even after they have exploded, do not , have not, and could not, create a disaster comparable to worldwide mercury poisoning. The most awful nuclear pollution pales relative to coal induced pollution. At worst, some areas may be returned to nature, and wolves, moose, lynxes and wild horses can come back, as is the case in Chernobyl. Six workers at Chernobyl were injured by one wolf (later shot).

So what is wrong with most ecologists’ heads? The simple fact that they don’t understand nuclear fire, but coal has been burned for a millennium?

Another thing self defeating ecologists do not understand is thermodynamics. Or even how the wind works, and why there is wind. If they understood all this, they would be less sanguine, especially about wind energy (10% decrease in wind speed bringing 30% down in energy, something to be expected not only as wind farms proliferate, but as the greenhouse proceeds…)

Some not only hate, or fear, what they don’t understand, but they hate it so much, or fear it so much, that they cannot be motivated to understand it, and, thus, fall prey to it with greater ease.It’s the deer-in-the-headlights syndrome.This mechanism was in full view, when the Nazis threatened the Jews, and various other potential victims. Failure to understand Nazism was the prime failure of their prey.

***

More Middle East Gates Of Hell:

Secretary of Defense Gates on “60 minutes”: “We are gaining the upper hand in Afghanistan… We are turning the corner“. The USA already acquired the upper hand in Afghanistan in 2001. So we have to guess it slipped down the sand pile in the meantime.

Pursuing his flight of fancy, Gates has found an improbable culprit, everybody else: “Maybe spent a trillion dollars in Iraq, 4,000 dead (etc.), and now the state department is going to carry us across the goal line… and the Congress is going to be penny wise, and pound foolish [and it will not happen]“. Verdict: Gates has watched too much sports. The world is not American football, but Gates, the ex intelligence chief of the CIA, does not understand that. So what does he understand? Whatever it is, it will be minute, and inconsequential.

In Iraq, or in Afghanistan, the American oligarchs played with history, something they did not master at school enough, to get a sense of it. History bites back, and North America is no island anymore, but a 40 minutes ballistic reach away, from anywhere in the world. And the world you build, is the one you have to live in, thereafter.

What is that the “goal line” Gates evokes? The USA has nearly reunited Iraq with Iran, through their common Shiite inheritance. Otherwise said, the USA has nearly reconstituted the (Baghdad) caliphate (which succeeded the Arab caliphate in 750 CE). The U.S. state department cannot go through the goal line, even if bloated with thousands of mercenaries to chase the terrorists around Iraq. American foreign policy, at least in Iraq, is a chicken without a head: its goal has nothing to do with what it can do, and is advantageous, only if what it wants, is a war with Iran. In Afghanistan, of course, for 32 years, there has been more coherence: the goal has been unending war, not just for war’s sake, but, as I explained, to get to some more oil and gas.

In the realm of the mad, lunatics are kings. But there is hope: the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court said that Colonel Qaddafi, his bright son Seif al-Islam Qaddafi, the de facto prime minister, and his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Sanousi (chief of intelligence) formed an inner circle that ‘crushed peaceful demonstrations and ordered the use of live ammunition and heavy weapons against protestors’. Three judges will decide whether to issue arrest warrants.

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New York Justice: Stupidity Makes Vicious.

A few words on the repugnant, uncivilized way, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, was dragged in the mud. It’s all too typical of the state with the world’s greatest incarcerated population. Fully one American adult citizen out of 20 is in serious trouble with the law, a proportion inconceivable in Europe.

Americans who do not have eyes to see, claim that, in the USA, people are “innocent until proven guilty“. While the police make sure the cameras are there before exposing said “innocent”. It’s called the “perp walk“. Yes, “perp walk”. So much for “innocence”. It is obvious that the “perp walk” creates a bias against the defendant, as, by definition, said defendant is presented as a “perpetrator“ (which is what “perp” means).

Such treatment against a person presumed innocent is unlawful in France. (Even suspected murderers can walk without handcuffs if not deemed very dangerous.) Judge Eva Joly, a well-known French and Norwegian magistrate, adviser of the Icelandic government on white collar crime, who once brought charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn for corruption (of which he was later acquitted), observed that “these are very violent images”. The images from New York. Very violent.

Americans seem unable to comprehend that the “perp walk” is a violation of basic rights. It is a curious thing.

At least, in the Middle Ages, when the humiliation of the pillory was applied, there was a conviction, prior. Madoff was free on bail, and so was Michael Jackson (suspected of serial pedophilia). That is what people know, when they look at it from the rest of the world.

Why does New York hate Strauss-Kahn that much? He was the Grinch who wanted to steal Christmas, as the French are won to (in the imagination of the owners of U.S. media).

Let me notice the following:

a) Strauss-Kahn changed completely the orientation of the IMF from an extremely abusive device at the service of American plutocracy, into something different. He also contributed to hold up European countries together with IMF funds (the EU contributes nearly 38% of the IMF; and the USA only 17%). Anybody reading even as “liberal” a “left wing” economist such as the esteemed Paul Krugman, will know that the Americans want to destroy the euro. To start with.

b) Strauss-Kahn held pro-government, pro-regulation opinions which are just the opposite from the anti-government, anti-regulation propaganda which presently reigns in the USA. As far as Wall Street was concerned, he was the enemy. Like Eliot Spitzer, or the Gracchi, long ago, Strauss-Kahn was the worst sort, traitor to his kind, and thus fully abreast of its tricks.

c) Manhattan is the very center of the pro-plutocratic worldwide octopus. The island lives off it. Such is often the paradox that people who profit most from an empire, find themselves at the center of it, and, even if they deplore it, they may sink themselves, if they think too much.

d) A conspiracy is not a plot. It’s much more sinister than that. The Romans had discovered that the simple fact that people together breathe (con-spirare) is enough to have dreadful consequences. A judge does not need to be bought off. Nor does the police. They are creatures of the same ecology, and if that ecology is threatened, they will strike back. In Manhattan, the ecology is the plutocracy.

Simple breathing-together of judges, police, and political, or plutocratic power, is enough to create bias, in the absence of very explicit legal guidelines. Breathing together is enough to build the right neurology of the conspirators, the neurology of mutually insured self survival.

Imperial Rome was full of police, and full of judges, all arrogantly above any suspicion, or self examination. They were full of it, and belong to the garbage of history, complete with their smug cruelty, and self interested stupidity. The Roman republic went down the drain on the heels of its degraded and degrading conception of justice. It resurfaced 2,000 years later.

RELIGION HAS TO BE REMOVED FROM THE POLITICAL EQUATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST. AND THAT PROBABLY MEANS BY FORCE. THE MEDITERRANEAN UNION AS A BETTER FINAL SOLUTION.

***

Abstract: When Christianism (grandiosely self described at the time as “Orthodox Catholicism”, namely Common Opinion Universalism) became officially the one and only religion of the fascist Roman empire, Judaism, the tribal source of Christianism, was programmed for extinction. This is the basic source of the Arab-Israeli conflict. To fix it, religions (and not just Hamas, as Israel’s foreign minister Tzipi Livni has it) have to be removed from the “equation”. And that will mean mental, legal, economic and if need be, physical force: if Gaza can be blockaded, so can others (including Israel).

Fortunately, after enough secularization, a solution exists to the entire mess: the establishment of a powerful Mediterranean Union.

***

***

Roger Cohen wrote an excellent essay on the Arab-Israeli conflict, in light of Israel’s assault on Gaza and Hamas [“Dominion of the Dead”, NYT and IHT, January 7, 2008]. In it Cohen argues, among other things, that the weight of dead history rules the conflict: “History is relentless. Sometimes its destructive gyre gets overcome: France and Germany freed themselves after 1945 from war’s cycle. So did Poland and Germany. China and Japan scarcely love each other but do business. Only in the Middle East do the dead rule.”

It may be rather the dominion of religions that is generating the hatred. From way back. (In P/S 6 below, we suggest the only viable long term solution, but religion will have to be defanged first.)

It is highly politically incorrect to attack religion, because a superficial reading of the republican constitution in Western secular states calls for tolerance. But TOLERANCE, IMPLICITLY, REQUIRES GOOD BEHAVIOR: the secular republic, a religion of its own, rules and just tolerates religious superstitions; it just tolerates them, no more, they have to behave.

Nevertheless, out of control religion obviously dominates the rest in the Middle East. It’s faiths over reason, and faiths rule. As faiths hate each other, and try to exterminate each other, it’s war for ever, as long as the final solution has not imposed itself.

Comparisons with past strife in Europe, and the present unification of Europe, have to be used very carefully, when talking about Israel and the Arabs. But they are revealing. Roger Cohen does not get into what made the European conflicts different from the Arab-Israeli conflict. We will do this presently, and it suggests how to get out of it.

One has first to look at the religious problem straight in the eye: Christianism and Islam are heresies of Judaism. Judaism is tribal. The God of Judaism is not nice (Jehovah obviously inspired the semi demented and certainly atrociously lethal, civilization shattering emperor Constantine). Christianism and Islam are universal (so Judaism is their natural enemy, except that they clearly originate from it, hence a self contradiction.)

Heresies hate each other all the more since the Bible, New and Old Testament, and Christian governmental practice, under the Roman empire, made clear that heretics should be executed (if possible by fire). Islam came after centuries of imperial Roman Catholic terror (which involved a “war against the philosophers”, book burning, mass murders and other civilization devolving atrocities; intellectuals and books had to flee to Persia!). Islam was fully inspired by them all.

(Meanwhile, in the West, the Franks had defanged Catholicism by 496 CE; the entire “Oriental Part” of the Roman empire, including Palestine and Arab lands missed that secular turn, and this is the root of the different fates of the “Pars Occidentalis” and the “Pars Orientalis”: the West became dominated by secular law and common sense, whereas the Orient slowly sunk under superstition and religious law, in spite of all those good books saved from Catholic burning.)

The Arab-Israeli conflict was built in the version of the Qur’an given to us by Caliph Uthman. In the Qur’an Jews are insulted, threatened, and apparently, threatened with death (whatever apologists of Islam who do not seem to have read the Qur’an in depth say). Interestingly, the Muslims inherited the hatred of Jews from the Christians (some are not going to like the word “hatred”; again, they should go back to the Qur’an, and read it, to learn that many pigs and monkeys are actually… Jews, put into this dismal state by God Himself). Threatened with death (once again!), the Jews/Israelis are in no mood to let their guard down.

So we cannot get out of the Arab-Israeli conflict as long as the religions are left to speak. Hamas, or Hezbollah, and most Arab states, and to a significant extent Israel, are all religious. To make matters worse, Hamas and Israel’s government have been democratically elected (that does not mean they are full democracies; they are not, because democracy requires full democratic institutions, and obedience to Universal Human Rights).

Let’s compare with Europe. Although sometimes there were extensive religious conflicts in Europe, they were not baked into the fundamental European conflict mix. Religions were incidental, incidental to, an excuse for, the fundamental power plays in Europe. On the grandest historical scheme, France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain belonged, sometimes for centuries, to the same country.

France, Germany and Poland were part of the same polity. Here are pell-mell samples of past facts: a lot of Germania was Roman, and all of Germany belonged to the Merovingian, and then Carolingian empires (which extended all the way to Poland); a British slave became empress of the Franks, a king of France married an Ukrainian princess, another a Danish princess, still another was elected king of Poland; France and Britain are actually the same country, more or less divided in two to this day (same with Germany), France was all involved in the Thirty Year war in Germany, Napoleon not only united Germany, but its Grand Army was greatly made of Germans, etc… So the fighting in Europe was inside a single civilizational system. Europeans all shared the same laws, religions and even language for centuries, or even millennia. They may have different languages now (again unified by Anglo-Normand, (aka “English”)), but they have the same cultural roots, they are all variants of the same civilization. The Greco-Romano-Frankish civilization.

In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the wars between France and Germany had clear rights and wrongs. For example the German universal health care system was clearly the best in the world, an inspiration for France. Germany had also the highest literacy rate in the world (about 100%).

But then, France was a democracy and a republic, with universal human rights, whereas Germany was not a republic, not a democracy, but a mild fascist system, a “Reich”. The “Reich”, then, not restrained by democratic checks and balances, became ever more fascist, and attacked all of Europe (August 1914). That did not work too well, so, propped by rogue American plutocrats, persisting in its erroneous ways, Germany became ever more fascist, racist and demented, until France and Britain declared war to it on September 3, 1939, to save democracy. By then many Germans had a feeling of doom, as they perceived they were not on the right side of right. Fascism in Germany was terminated in 1945, and many of the Nazis had come to realize, even before this, that they could not go on like that. There was a clash of civilization, and the good civilization won.

It’s politically correct to proclaim that there is no clash of civilization between Islam and the rest. But Islam was initially constructed as a war machine against Christianity and Judaism, just like Christianity was constructed as a war machine against all other religions (and exterminated them all, except Judaism, although it came close in the fifth century). Right now, there is at least a clash of religions.

Some of the wrongs between Israel and Islam are from way back: Christianity was built by oppressing the Jews (allusion to what Constantine and his successors did). Christians ejected Jews from Israel, and built a church on the great Jewish temple. Islam inherited this, but cranked it up to the next level, by making the oppression of the Jews not just official, but legal. They also built several Muslim mosques and “shrines”on the Jewish Temple Mount, perhaps to show they were several times as bad as the Christians. (By then the Franks were applying full Roman law again and had given the Jews their full rights back, in equality with Catholics.)

Islam is antidemocratic (it’s not just a religion but a system of government that loudly proclaim what Hitler called the “Fuehrerprinzip”, i.e., the Chief is always endowed by God with absolute right). Israel is also fundamentally anti democratic: to say that people from a particular religion (Judaism) have particular rights on a piece of land is an offensive tribal imposition.

And so on. Both sides are very wrong. If they keep on persisting in their erroneous ways, Weapons of Mass Destruction will set them right, or whatever dust is left. If one wants to help them out, one has to tell them their thousands truths mighty soon, in no uncertain terms, and apply enough carrots and sticks to change their behavior. Being just nice will not do it. They cannot be treated as adults. It is extremely clear in the case of Hamas, but, unfortunately, this applies to Israel too. Democracy can go wrong when its institutional roots are not deep enough: consider the Weimar republic.

To come back to the democracy-turned-fascist that misgoverned Germany with the anxious approval of the German people: democracy was imposed by force there in 1945, after killing more than 11% of the German population, and destroying the country (unfortunately). If France and Great Britain had attacked earlier, the outcome would have been better (but Great Britain, as the USA, had no army, and no inclination to treat Germany, or the Nazis, severely). In other words, force can work as a last resort. To break the rule of Islam and Judaism in the Middle East as political system is a necessity, and will happen, either by polite force, or massive destruction.***

Patrice AymePatriceayme.com ***

P/S 1: To the European historical entanglement corresponded psychological entanglements. The Roman aggression, or, let’s say, civilizational push, made the rather pacific Germans ever more aggressive and militarized in return (we know this from archeological studies). In turn Rome became ever more fascist (as generals such as Marius became larger than previously authorized life). Thus, historically and ironically, in the great and long confrontation between Roma and Germania, Rome was advanced, but fascist, and Germania was primitive, but democratic and anti-sexist. After a millennium of this, the Germans (in the person of the elected king of the Franks Clovis) learned to become fascist (Clovis became Consul and exerted Roman imperator powers demonstrated in the summary execution of a follower during the “Vase de Soisson” incident, when Clovis imposed his Roman imperator power for all Franks to see). Meanwhile, transmogrified by German influence, the Romans became less sexist (they had at least one fully ruling and civilization forging empress, an “Augusta”).

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P/S 2: Thus conflict creates mental entanglement, and right now, that means entanglement with hatred. And hatred plenty there will be, because Israel has already killed hundreds of apparently innocent small children in Gaza in the present offensive. Differently from the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto by the Nazis, and in spite of Israeli efforts to hide it all, this is in full sight of the entire planet.

Now the entire planet, differently from the populace of Nazi Germany (from which the Nazi crimes against civilians were rather hidden, thanks to an undeniable Will to Ignorance of the German population, and heavy censorship), is confronted with having to decide to protest this, or not, and do something about it, or not. When children are dying, the weight is heavy. The whole planer is watching, and it is not deep in a jungle in Congo somewhere, out of sight, out of mind. There is only so much that the entire planet’s moral sense can take. At some point, only force will bring relief. But that means enforcing no more attacks, from any side. Neither from bulldozers, rockets, nor hate inspired documents, such as the literal, Uthman inspired Qur’an, or literal interpretations of tribal Judaism.

Listening to Israeli civilians watching a city being bombed, approving loudly, and insisting they would love to see it razed, and they don’t mind, because they feel “fascist” [sic! from a woman with reddish hair], shows, clearly that the human impulses that led to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto are not restricted to Nazism. Israel is entering there an extreme danger zone, because it exists strictly at the goodwill of the EU and USA. It is hubris to feel otherwise.

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P/S 3: Massively lethal force was used to remove religion from the political equation in Europe, all over Europe, killing millions [part of the process included the horrible religious wars of the 16-17 C].

By the time the US Constitution rolled out, the removal by force of religion from the equation was a given (so the USA does not have as much memory of the struggle to eliminate religion from politics). The first two US presidents put it thus in a joint document:”… As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion…”[1796-97]. (The recent re-imposition of religion in the USA, is very recent, indeed, dating from 1956, and is, of course, an ominous decline, in part at the root of the present socioeconomic crisis, and Warren is its prophet. Amen.)

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P/S 4: The British government accepted that France was not part of its dominion only in 1815 CE. So the “100 year war” (officially 1337-1453 or 1337-1558, when Calais fell back in official French hands) lasted nearly 500 years. It was originally a French civil war between the Plantagenet and the Valois (with right being on the British side). In 1940, the Prime Minister, Churchill proposed the (re-)unification of France and Britain as one country, but the idiotic French PM declined. Nowadays, British and French are European Union citizens, and are getting quickly more unified than ever.

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P/S 5: The European Middle Ages has bad reputation as a period of strife, and it’s entirely unjustified. It is the rise of religious hatred in Europe that caused the strife, and that was at the end of the Middle Ages (and it was inaugurated by the Crusade against the Toulouse County). The religious wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth century had a base in political power struggles, but the mobs got really driven mad by various variants of the Judeo-Christian faith. This went on for two centuries, and killing children or infants was standard. Although religion got clamped down in the end, some of the losses were so high that hatred kept on going. A tradition of hating France appeared in Germany in no small reason because of the massive French intervention in the “Thirty Year War” of the seventeenth century, which was a religious war, probably the worst of them all. This is clear from the writings of the German philosopher Herder [the anti-Goethe], that had a great nationalistic, homicidal influence [all the way to Hitler]. Thus the huge wars that happened later (mostly propelled by Napoleonic and Prussian fascisms) were, at least partially, consequences of, and echoes from, the period of religious wars earlier on.

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P/S 6: THE MEDITERRANEAN UNION AS SOLUTION:

Is a long term peaceful solution possible to the question of Israel? Sure. But one has to get the religions back in their cages underground first, and throw away the key.

Second, the solution will have to be imposed by force, say by the future imperial might of the (inchoating) Euro-Mediterranean Union. The idea would be to recreate basically the Roman empire (minus the crazy homicidal Christian rule of the late empire), with Israel as a precious asset, a larger version of the United Arab Emirates, a rich province profitable to its neighbors. By force, we mean legal force (preferably), a more muscular version of the force used in the EU construction.

The EU construction is made to make local antagonisms irrelevant, and local democracy, with full democratic institutions, a necessity. Turkey has been trying, for half a century to satisfy the EU requirements; several of the Latin and Mediterranean dictatorships (Greece, Spain, Portugal) became democracies to gain EU access. A full Mediterranean Union could duplicate the process, making the Israeli-Arab conflict irrelevant and obsolete. Fundamentally the Jews are just a tribe that was pushed out of Arabia, so, please grow up, and forget about your personal direct access to God, each of you.

It has been in the interest of the USA to support the European Union construction (because the EU extends to all of Europe the Franco-British democratic core, genitor to the USA, and, if nothing else, the USA will not have to come to the military rescue of France and Britain once again). For similar reasons, it is in the interest of the USA to push for the Mediterranean Union (a Sarkozy idea that has been mollified at this point). Ultimately, and naturally, the Mediterranean Union would get incorporated within the EU.

Cynics will wonder how many divisions the future Mediterranean Union has. Well, just wait. As it is, about half of the NATO force in Afghanistan is not American (there are even some Arab forces). NATO may be better used, negotiating and retreating in Afghanistan while redeploying around Israel to enforce the secular law (there is already an important UN force in Lebanon doing just that; first headed by the French, then the Italians, it has more than 12,000 soldiers, plus an important naval arm). enough of the utopia of two states peacefully side by side: the time of a greater force has come.